NEW YORK DAILY NEWS-CHRISTINA'S WORLD (SUNDAY NOVEMBER 14,1999)

Christina's World

Princess of horror teams up again with Johnny Depp in 'Sleepy Hollow'

By JONATHAN MANDELL

In the first scene they ever played together on the screen, Christina Ricci lunged at Johnny Depp, knocked him down and then tried to eat his sneaker.

This wasn't very romantic, but it wasn't supposed to be. Depp was playing the balding, drugged-out gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson in last year's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas." Ricci had a small role, little more than that single scene in his hotel room, playing an underage girl tripping on LSD and obsessed with Barbra Streisand.

If this was an odd encounter, it is nowhere near as bizarre as the scenes they play together in Friday's "Sleepy Hollow," the new Tim Burton film that is loosely based on Washington Irving's classic tale about a headless horseman menacing a small village in Westchester. They are the romantic leads, whose first scene is a passionate kiss.

"It was weird," Ricci says now.

Why weird? Because when they first met in real life, on the set of her first movie, "Mermaids," in 1990, Depp was an actor in his mid-20s and Ricci was 9 years old.

To most moviegoers, Christina Ricci is probably still best known as the deadpan daughter Wednesday in the "Addams Family" pictures, the one with the tight black pigtails, and the pale face, who would throw her baby brother off the roof or try to guillotine him.

"Wednesday was a really shocking character. I don't think people can get past that," Ricci says now, her features in person almost fragile in their surprising delicacy but her eyes as big and unblinking as in her scariest roles.

Those who are too young to remember her from the "Addams Family" movies are likely to recognize her as the juvenile love interest of Casper the friendly ghost in another movie made from an old comic-horror TV show.

But if it is taking the public some time to catch up with her, Ricci, now 19, sees herself as all grown up, at least as an actress.

"I certainly hope I'm not still answering child star questions by the time I reach menopause," she complains.

Indeed. With "Sleepy Hollow," she becomes for the first time a leading lady in a mainstream Hollywood film — as mainstream, in any event, as any movie directed by Tim Burton can be.

"She has that timeless look to her," Burton says. "You really don't know how old she is. She could be 12, she could be 48."

Ricci thus seems to have succeeded in crossing the treacherous bridge from child star to adult roles, unlike, say, her former classmate Macauley Culkin, who, also now 19, has not made a movie in five years. They attended the Professional Children's School in Manhattan together.

"He was forced to work," she says. "I wanted to work."

Best and Worst Films

In the past 10 years, Ricci has made some two dozen films. The most embarrassing one to her, she says, is 1997's "That Darn Cat," a Disney remake that, if it had winked any harder, would have ruptured a few eye vessels.

The film she is proudest of occurred the same year, "The Ice Storm," a serious, well-played look at the disconnection of a family in suburbia, similar to this year's "American Beauty," but more subtle, more grim. Ricci played the intelligent but disturbed teenage daughter, sexually precocious, sexually predatory. In place of winks, there were shivers.

After "Ice Storm," which she considers her breakthrough role, the actress appeared in eight pictures last year — almost all sophisticated or at least quirky independent films, the kind that play in art houses.

"She could have made a lot of money, been the cutesy-poo that everybody wants to see," says Johnny Depp, who in his own career chose to be a character actor rather than the leading man his looks could have won for him.

"I wasn't offered those parts," Ricci responds later, demolishing her current co-star's compliment with her candor. "At around 15, they stopped casting me."

That is when she started her own production company, which she named Blaspheme Films.

"I just like the sound of the word. But also, the idea of blasphemy is bizarre to me. Would a God that is so understanding and loving and sort of above all of human squabbles really be offended by words?"

Praise for Child-Woman Roles

If she considers herself an adult actress now, the truth is, in many of her recent roles, she was cast as a child-woman. But the films were unmistakably for adults, and her acting in them has been almost universally praised. In each one, she doesn't just have a different hair color but a convincingly varied character: The kidnapped tap dancer forced to pretend to be her abductor's wife in Vincent Gallo's "Buffalo 66"; the murderous little vamp who seduces her older brother's lover in "The Opposite of Sex," and the tyrannical laundromat-managing girlfriend of Edward Furlong in John Waters' "Pecker," a film about a regular guy who becomes a celebrity by taking photographs of his strange friends and family.

Unlike her character in that film, Ricci sees the taking of her picture as having indeed made her life indisputably better. She was a disciplinary problem in school, she says, until she turned professional actress. It is one reason she has decided, against her family's wishes, not to go to college.

"I love acting, I hate school," she explains in her blunt way.

"Sleepy Hollow" is the movie she made during what would have been her freshman year. The movie features Ricci (in a role that is smaller than the posters, trailers and second billing might suggest) as Katrina Van Tassel, an 18th-century damsel — complete with long blond tresses, elegant frilly dresses and a vaguely old-fashioned upper-crust accent with which she delivers lines like: "Goodbye Ichabod Crane, I curse the day you came to 'Sleepy Hollow.'"

"She was a blooming lass of fresh 18," Washington Irving describes Miss Van Tassel in his story, "plump as a partridge, ripe and melting and rosy-cheeked as one of her father's peaches, and universally famed, not merely for her beauty, but her vast expectations."

What of this describes Ricci?

"Well, I don't know," she says. "I was 18 when it was filmed."

Ricci herself is no longer plump as a partridge, though she filled out a few years ago. Her weight, she's said, was one factor in making it difficult for her to get parts, and she has talked in the past about her troubles with anorexia, which she says are now over.

She also does not see herself as universally famed, at least not in her own estimation.

"When I was 16, I thought I was a failure." She also has expressed insecurity about her looks. But she surely has vast expectations.

"I've always been really competitive," she says.

It is what Tim Burton calls her "very intense, ambiguous quality" — when she looks at you, "you don't know if she likes you or hates you" — that helped convince him to cast her in "Sleepy Hollow."

Career Follows Trail of Terror

Full of spells, witches' incantations and decapitations, the movie continues a theme that runs throughout Ricci's career of exploring the dark side, or the supernatural or the scary. This has been present from the earliest moments — one of the commercials she appeared in before she started making movies was for a monster cereal, Count Chocula — to the latest — she plans to start work soon on a filmed version of "Prozac Nation," about depression. Even in the cutesy "That Darn Cat," she played a smart outcast, who dressed in all black.

Why is she so identified with the mordant and the morbid?

She rejects the question. "It's so normal for a teenager to dress in black — and be real unhappy, and stay in your room, and say sarcastic things. How could something so normal be considered morbid?"

As she says this, Ricci has her hands crossed in front of her as if lying in a coffin. Her nail polish is a dark purple.

It is Halloween when we speak, and Christina Ricci, like many people in New York, is going to a Halloween party. "It's my mother's dog's costume party."

But, unlike the people who watch her films, it is the first Halloween party she has gone to in more than a decade.

"Ever since I was 8," she says, "I've always been working on Halloween."